Introduction to Object-Oriented Design
Technical Note: The Audio parts of Sun's course are implemented using RealAudio with the "dnet" codec and this does not seem to be supported anymore. I will see what I can find out and post it here.
During this course an example project will be developed. The purpose of the example project is to design a checkbook manager program.
Statement of Purpose
Structured Programming
Structured programming uses top-down design to decompose a problem into a series of successively more granular functions.
Structured programming requires well-defined flow control. Languages that support this are often called procedural languages because of their heavy reliance on procedures.
Object-Oriented Programming (OOP)
In OOP, you think about the system you're modeling and how the elements in the system interact with each other.
The Design Process
Begin by identifying the real-world entities in your problem domain. Next, you define the classes that model these real-world entities. Generally, your classes will be the nouns that figure in your problem domain. Avoid class names that describe computer concepts like stack or array, as well as names that are built from verbs. The idea is not to describe a computer program, but to describe a business situation. Verbs make good names for methods (also called functions) but bad names for classes.